Conduction cooled narrow linewidth sub-nanosecond multi-beam laser

Abstract:

A conduction cooled high peak power, narrow linewidth, and sub-nanosecond multi-beam laser as an excellent candidate for non-scanning lidar is demonstrated. This laser is based on master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA) scheme which consists of a pulse pumped Nd:YAG/Cr4+:YAG microchip laser as the master oscillator and a high efficient grazing incidence Nd:YVO4 slab amplifier, and the output beam is expanded to 100 mm diameter by a 50× low aberration Galileo beam expander and then divided into a 50×2 staggered arrangement multi-beam array by a diffractive laser splitter. The laser operates at 1 064.28 nm with a spectral linewidth about 20 pm, which generates 1 mJ, 0.78 ns pulses at 7 kHz rate. The fluctuation of output power is less than ±2% when it works continuously for 1 h. The energy uniformity of the 100 sub-beams is up to 90%, the divergence of each sub-beam is about 20 μrad, and the total transmission efficiency of the diffractive laser splitter is more than 85%.